Queen of all my dreams
by irnan
Summary: He has always been her servant. AU, Mary/John
1. Chapter 1

_This is a disclaimer._

_AN: You'd think I had enough AUs already... if you want to read the snippet that started this 'verse, head over to my lj. Link's in my bio._

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**Queen of all my dreams**

He had always been her servant. His father, too, was a favourite of hers, sneaky, clever, brave, resourceful. His mother she loved as a sister; they were worthy of each other, Penelope and Odysseus, and their son, she was sure, would grow to be worthy of them.

She'd come to them often after her brother's servants began their campaign, to see the boy, keep an eye on both mother and child even as she helped the father. She'd never been as cruel or capricious as her sister Aphrodite: loyalty and love were rewarded with loyalty and love.

Love? Bah. A boyish infatuation, that's all it was. Glances, smiles quickly smothered when she entered a room, eyes following her when she left. A boyish infatuation.

Then that awful mess her brother's servants had made of Ilium took up all her attention, and after that Odysseus himself… the man was just _incapable_ of staying out of trouble. Athena had no idea how he did it. Eventually, she admitted to herself that she couldn't just sit around watching him all day, waiting to perform some miracle for him.

_The Gods help those who help themselves!_ her father had thundered at some family gathering or other, waving his sloshing wine cup, and everyone in the room had rolled their eyes and gone back to their meals, but now Athena thought back to it, and grinned. Well, why not?

The plan had gone well. All her plans did; wasn't she the Goddess of wisdom as well as war? Ares, poor bloodthirsty fool, had never understood how to combine the two, but that was why he always lost to her, after all.

Anyway. The plan had gone well. Odysseus had come home at last, Penelope was blissfully happy, Telemachos had a father again. There was no reason for Athena to stay. None at all. But Penelope begged her to, and Odysseus joined in, and so she relented.

_He_ never said a word, just sat at the table watching her, silent, maybe a little amused, as if he could tell that something had changed.

As if he'd heard her heart skip a beat when they met again at last; as if he felt her eyes on him the way his had so often been on her.

Telemachos was a boy no longer, taller than she was now, broad-shouldered, longish thick dark hair, beautiful brown eyes flecked with hazel-gold. Voice like silk would sound… no, velvet. Dark and heavy and smooth as sin. Eyelashes far too long for a man, and hands rough with calluses, quick and strong.

She needed to have a word with Aphrodite about this. It was ridiculous. He was a mortal, for heaven's sake! And she did have a reputation to uphold.

(True, she had no idea who started that ridiculous rumour that she was eternally virgin – come to think of it, probably Aphrodite herself – but if it made them all happy, why bother arguing with it?)

In the end, it was all so simple, quick and easy as falling asleep. Falling into him instead…

A scene from one of Eros' stories, this, a wrong turn in darkened gardens, a bathing pool she hadn't noticed before. He'd never learned to school his features, hide his emotions. She saw desire burn in his eyes before he turned his back, stuttered out an apology for disturbing her.

Athena barely heard him. The world had narrowed, shrunk, tightened, centering around this one garden, this little pool, him and her, and suddenly she saw her fate as clearly as if Lachesis had told her of it.

Her fate, and his, and maybe that of all the world.

His skin was warm when she rested her hand on his back, between his shoulder blades, warm and sticky with sweat, and she traced her fingertips down his spine, slowly, lightly, tracing ridges and hollows. He shivered with the slight touch, and slowly turned.

_Silk-wrapped steel_, a voice that sounded like Aphrodite whispered in her mind as her hands flattened over his chest, as his heart beat against her palm, as his arms tightened around her and his mouth came down on hers. _Did I not tell you, sister, that you too would fall? All serve me eventually. Mortal or Olympian, man or woman, all serve me soon or late. Even you, Pallas Athena, Goddess of Wisdom though you are._

In the pale cool dawn, as they parted, she tugged him close. "Come to me again tonight," she ordered, smiling lips still swollen with his kisses, and he smiled.

"Your servant, Lady," he said, and then, taking her hand, kissed it softly. "Always your servant."

It wasn't the sort of thing that stayed secret for long. Penelope thinned her lips but didn't say anything, and Odysseus just chuckled. Athena's servants, whether priestess or warrior, merely smiled. Their mistress long been sensible, detached, too rational for her own good. Now, though…

Father sulked for weeks when she told him of Telemachos, asked him to grant her lover immortality. "And eternal youth," Athena added sweetly as his face lit up with sadistic glee, and Hera snickered when he glared.

"Just do it," she said. "You've had your fun with poor Eos. If anyone should be sitting around up here thinking up new ways to torment your multitude of bastard brats, it should be me."

But she winked at Athena as she said it.

"Immortality?" Tel said disbelievingly. "Me? But, Lady…"

"No buts," she said, kneeling by him, taking his hands in hers, tilting her head back to look into his eyes. "No buts. Stay with me, Tel. Be my consort. Be mine, forever."

"Pallas," he tried again, and it was the first time he'd spoken her name, called her anything but _my lady_. "Pallas, I – my father –"

"Your father is my servant, too," Athena pointed out, rather acidly. "After all I've done for him, he can spare me his son, don't you think?"

For the first time, his lips twitched into a half-smile. "Well…"

"Be my consort, Tel," she repeated softly. "You're my closest friend, my best advisor, my lord and my love. I want no other by my side or in my bed, ever again. Stay with me."

"You're mad," he said. "You'll tire of me in a few decades."

"You think so, Prince Telemachos?"

"I hope not, Pallas Athena."

Immortality, once granted, cannot so easily be taken away, any more than many of the powers that come with it. But they can be diminished; for as all people know, the Gods draw what powers they have from the worship and belief of their followers.

Eventually, the Olympians were replaced in the hearts and minds of men by the God of the Hebrews, and with him this Christ whom so many of them began to turn to. In Rome itself, the great city that was heir to Ilium itself, the Christian cross was raised, and Athena found her family gathered at the Moirae, pale and worried.

"There's death and then there's death, you know," Atropos croaked, not very helpfully.

Clothos shook her shining hair back from her face. "First lesson in humanity. Things change. Deal with it."

Behind her, Athena heard Tel choke back a laugh. She, too, was smiling a little. She'd seen this coming long before any of them, and she and Tel had been living as humans for some time now, mostly in Egypt. It was warm there, and sunny. Alexandria was beautiful.

(And Cleopatra had long ago given them the most beautiful house there, when Tel agreed to let Rome believe her child was his in order to protect the country. Athena had teased him once or twice about his willingness to help a damsel in distress, and he always laughed at her. "I suppose you would rather I was more like Ares? He'd just bed them.")

"But-" Father was protesting.

"You can cross the River any time you want, Lord," Atropos said. "You wouldn't even have to die first."

"Athena?" Artemis said, demanding rather than asking advice, as always. Imperious young huntress.

Athena straightened a little. "Stay if you wish to. Go if you wish to. All I am sure of is that we here will never again have a say in the ordering of the world."

Lachesis chuckled, warm and gently, a mother's laughter at the antics of her child. "Pallas speaks well. But then, she was always the most sensible of the lot of you, the only one not obsessed with her own petty wars and triumphs. There comes a battle, my lord Gods, a battle in which will be decided the fate of all this world. You care little for it, I know, other than as a stage upon which you play out your own dramas, but when the time of Christ has almost passed, when this new religion falls… then even you will have to choose a side."

She fell silent then, measuring and measuring, the thread of a man's life, and the sound of Atropos' shears snipping shut echoed loudly around the hall.

"For every new religion brings its own demons," she said at last, and far away in Nicomedia, an Emperor died.


	2. Chapter 2

It might well have been true that the Olympians would never again direct the course of the world, but old habits die hard, and it wasn't long before they all started to meddle.

Of them all, Athena and Tel were best at it.

They lived in Rome, in Byzantine and Egypt, travelled to Asia several times, re-tracing their footsteps from the time they had conquered all this land for Greece. They fought in countless wars together, sometimes as generals, sometimes as soldiers.

In Jerusalem, they wandered the streets that men would fight over for the next two thousand years and more, and Athena felt a shiver run through her as she looked out at the city. The land men had already begun to name holy made her feel almost afraid, unease and foreboding growing in the goddess with every day they spent there.

"There's something here, Tel," she said to him. "Something in this city, or near it… it's not holy, love. It's anything but holy. It _hates_. Hates all of us, bloodthirsty and evil."

Tel drew her close, tried to pretend he hadn't felt it as clearly as she. They left the next day, travelled east once more, into the rising sun.

They had countless names, lived many lives in many lands, often growing rich and powerful… and then 'died', moved on, became new people.

"Secrecy," Zeus announced in one of his more sober moments, "is paramount. If we're going to outlast these Christian fools, we'll do it in secret."

Athena, usually the most sensible one of the lot, seemed to be the only member of the family incapable of following this order of Father's. Whenever she and Tel were in Europe, she found herself battling the Christian church at every turn. In Britain, Athena had blocked the black priests and limited their influence in the island as much as she could, refusing to let Tel get involved. He couldn't afford to fight them openly.

"You'll get yourself into more trouble than you can handle anymore, Lady," he said one night as they lay before their fire. She was curled up in his lap, her head resting on his shoulder, staring into the flames. "You know how powerful these people are… this religion is. If you keep defying them so openly…"

"How can I not?" she asked softly. "How can I sit back and watch them forbid this and deny the other and disregard all knowledge and learning but their own? I no longer have the power to stop them, true. But I am still Minerva. I am still Neith, Prince Telemachos. I am all that hath been, that is, and that shall be. I am Pallas Athena, Atrytone and Promachos. I am Aethyta, and I will not be cowed by these savages. Wisdom and knowledge does not belong to them alone."

Tel sighed, breath stirring her hair, and she thought she heard a trace of relief in it, of satisfaction. "I knew you would say that."

"Is that not why you love me?" she asked, tone of voice mischievous but otherwise completely in earnest.

He smiled, kissed her long and deep. "Yes. Oh, yes."

She didn't tell him about the rumours the priests had already started about their king's wife, whispers accusing her of anything from infidelity (with any and all of Tel's captains) to devil-worship. They weren't even all that wrong about the last one.

In the end, as the times grew more dangerous, the Church more powerful, more savage and unforgiving, Tel dragged her out of Europe, and they returned to Asia, travelling from Byzantine – Constantinople now – to the ruins of Babylon. They heard the new Prophet of the Arab tribes speak, and lived in Egypt again for many years. Athena had never forgotten her roots here, though the temple at Sais that the people had raised to Neith, Goddess of War and of the Hunt, was long gone.

"What's this myth about you being the source of the Nile and the mother of Ra?" Tel asked curiously the first time he heard it. "You've never mentioned it before."

Athena shrugged. "I've always been puzzled by that one," she admitted. "I'm not usually the first choice for a mother goddess."

"I think you'd make a wonderful mother," he said quietly. She looked up at him sharply, long blonde hair shining brightly in the morning sun, those famous green eyes fixed on him.

"Eventually," Tel added a heartbeat later. She turned away then, smiling, cheeks a little warm, feeling oddly free and happy, as if a promise had been made that she had been waiting for a long time.

Inevitably, they returned to Europe a few centuries later, and almost immediately got caught up in the horrors of the Albigensian Crusade and the Inquisition. Athena fought against it with all her cunning and might, Tel always at her side, but it covered the continent in the end. Only their beloved Britain escaped the worst of it.

Then, one day in the early fourteenth century, they had their first real fight.

Athena and Telemachos were so very similar in many ways – passionate, stubborn, quick to anger, unforgiving – that perhaps it wasn't surprising that the argument went from a lover's quarrel at a family gathering to a war that lasted a hundred years.

And perhaps it was telling that it happened at a family gathering, that for all the long years they had travelled the world alone together no disagreement, no little quarrel they had ever had had made them both act the way they were now.

What made it worse was that Athena was all too aware of just how ridiculous she was being. She'd overreacted, and Tel had been rightly angry, and suddenly they were shouting things at each other that neither of them could ever forgive. No matter that they hadn't truly meant a word of it. But somewhere inside her a nagging little voice of fear and doubt just wouldn't let go.

After the first round of shouting, yelling, name-calling and ridiculous accusations had led to an out-and-out battle, Hera had been a little worried, but still shrugged it off as something they'd both get over eventually… until Tel _destroyed_ Athena's troops at Agincourt.

After that, there was no going back. Pallas Athena was not about to be beaten by some mortal upstart.

Even Ares was impressed by the scale and length of the following conflict. Hera watched it worriedly, growing more and more concerned about her favourite step-daughter and son-in-law.

It was Aphrodite's fault, of course. Every major war in the history of the Olympians had been Aphrodite's fault, and the little witch stayed well out of her sister's way for decades.

And Hera's. The Queen of the Olympians was unimpressed to say the least with her step-daughter's part in Athena and Tel's current… disagreement.

Several decades later, Athena, getting more and more fed up with the whole thing, took a personal hand in the conflict, as Tel had at Agincourt, routed his armies, re-took her lands, and was on the verge of ending the war once and for all. The longer their separation lasted, the more she missed him, longed for him. She had started this. She should finish it.

When the treaties were signed – when she'd _won_ – she'd go to him. He would apologise – oh, all right. She would apologise. Then, everything could just… go back to the way it was before. She'd end the war, find him, and ask his forgiveness.

Maybe. Probably.

But then Tel, in a move that would have done his father proud, instigated a minor mutiny against her and had his men take her captive and put her on trial for heresy. Threatened sentence: burning at the stake.

That was when Hera decided that it was time to intervene. Zeus rolled his eyes at her and made some dirty joke, but she ignored him. Why break the habit of a lifetime?

In her cell, Athena was pacing and cursing, shaking with fury. _How dared he?_ Hadn't she made him everything he was? Hadn't she given him immortality? Hadn't she protected his family for centuries before he was even born?

"Thena?"

"Dite. What do you want?" It was a snarl that would have done Artemis herself proud.

"To apologise," Aphrodite admitted, stepping into the little room nervously.

"Don't, then," Athena snapped. "Don't ever apologise. You've done nothing wrong, I'm sure. It's that bastard out there- " She waved a hand out of the window in the direction of the English encampment, "- that's in the wrong. If anyone should be apologizing! He wants to _burn me alive_."

"I kissed him," Aphrodite said. "_I_ kissed _him_. I was drunk and upset and I – I kissed him. These Christians, they hate me so much, you know. I just- it was stupid. I'm sorry, Thena. I knew he was yours. He's always been yours."

Athena didn't move, or look over at her sister. Her hands were clenched into tight fists to stop their trembling, eyes fixed on some point out of the window.

"I know," she whispered at last.

Aphrodite sighed, shifting instantly from shame-faced little sister to wise Goddess. "Then why all this?"

"I don't – I don't know," Athena sobbed. "It – he-"

Her sister wrapped both arms around her, held her as she cried. "Well?"

"Why me?" Athena whispered at last. "Why me, Dite? He wants children some day, for heavens' sake. I'm a goddess of _war_. All I know how to do is fight. To kill, to outsmart people. I gave him immortality, and he's watched everyone he's ever known and loved die because of it. His home is gone…"

Aphrodite groaned. Then she calmly pulled back and slapped her. "Enough with the feeling sorry for yourself," she said as Athena sat staring in surprise, cheek already reddening with her sister's handprint. "No goddess behaves like this. No _woman_ behaves like this. He loves you, you little fool. I knew he'd be your consort from the moment he first laid eyes on you. Could hear bells sounding from the other side of the Mediterranean. I daresay he was an arrogant bastard, but I'm equally sure you were a mistrustful bitch. Now pull yourself together and go to him."

Athena sniffled a bit. "Thanks for coming," she said with a watery smile.

"Don't thank me. Hera made me come."

Later that night, the guards at the English king's bedchamber admitted having let a blonde girl into the rooms – _she said you invited her, Sire_, with a leer that would have done Ares himself proud – and Tel needed no further explanation to know who it was.

Sure enough, she was sitting perched on the end of his bed, wearing a simple green dress and no shoes, hair hanging loose and face pale but calm.

"You hardly even tried to make me see sense," she said, and in spite of herself, he thrilled to hear her voice again, smooth and warm and clear as a bell. "You just – it was as if you'd been expecting something to happen."

Tel knew what she meant. Tired, he was oh so tired of this, all his anger burned away decades ago. The only thing keeping him on his feet – keeping him away from her – was pride. He unbuckled his sword-belt, let it fall with an almighty clatter.

"You're a goddess, Lady. I'm no longer mortal, true… but I'm still just a man. Eventually, you were going to wake up and realise that compared to you – compared to all your family… I'm nothing."

And all he wanted was to be safe in her arms again.

She stood up, came towards him, and he drank in the sight of her, the faint smell of oranges that had clung to her for as long as he could remember, the way she moved, lithe and graceful as a dancer, a warrior. The curve and swing of her hips, the soft skin of her throat he ached to kiss, the press of her breasts against silk.

Her hands were trembling a little as she faced him.

"Nothing compared to me," she repeated, catch in her voice. "Oh, Tel. I'm nothing without you, do you hear me? Nothing. I can't even _breathe_ without you anymore."

Cold links of his chainmail bit into her skin through her dress as he pressed her close, and she wound her arms around his neck and let herself go.

Skin on skin, deep fierce kisses, hands everywhere, bodies moving together as if they'd been apart hours rather than years. He'd cut his hair, and she pushed her fingers though it and laughed when she couldn't get a grip to gently tug his head up to hers. She was thinner and paler than he remembered, and he traced the new scar across her upper thigh and hip with gentle kisses, as if the mere touch of his mouth could smooth it away.

"Promise me we'll never part again," she whispered in the pre-dawn light as she held him close, his head on her breast, eyes heavy with weariness.

He raised her hand to his lips the way he had done that first morning in the garden in Greece. "Your servant, Lady. Always your servant."

They'd been fighting for a century, so it was only appropriate that they spend the next hundred years hidden away in Greece, Athena decided. A villa by the sea, out-of-the-way, quiet, beautiful. They talked and teased and bickered, swam and walked and made love, and Athena had rarely been so happy.

Time means little to immortal beings, days blurring together endlessly. You turn around once and suddenly find it was fifty years later – or more. Tel woke one evening after a long siesta and realised it was 1531 already. Athena was still dozing by his side, hair still damp with their earlier swim. He slipped out of bed and padded silently out of the wide doors onto the patio. The sun was rapidly sinking, a warm breeze blowing from the ocean.

If he closed his eyes and stood very still, he could imagine he was home again. Penelope singing, his father's laughter – the father he had barely had the chance to know.

A warm hand trailing down his back, and he smiled, turned, drew her into his arms. Pallas pressed her back against his chest, looking out over the bay.

"Happy?" she asked softly, and Telemachos grinned. "No, Lady, utterly miserable. Returned home at last, the woman I've loved since boyhood in my arms, and yet I just can't-"

She elbowed him in the ribs, and he burst out laughing.

"You're all I've ever wanted," he said softly by her ear.

"Because you're mad," she said. He wound his hands under the loose layers of silk wrapped around her, smoothed a hand over even-softer skin.

"Completely insane," he agreed, loving the way she shivered at his touch. His boyish infatuation with her had always been tinged with the worship of a mortal for an otherworldly being more powerful, more beautiful than he, flawless and untouchable. That worship had long since become love; love of a woman as human as he in all important respects, with faults and tempers and bad days just as he had, and it was the deeper for it.

Tel kissed her temple as she turned to him a little, leaning back in invitation, but his hands stilled a moment later.

"Pallas… look!"

"We've been here that long already?"

Their comet streaked across the night sky, long and bright. Every 76 years it appeared, one of the easier ways to keep track of the centuries. Why bother remembering the years when they mean as much to you as an hour does to a mortal?

This year, the comet seemed closer to Earth than ever before, tail long and wide, lighting up the sky. Pallas shivered.

"It shouldn't be that close," she whispered.

"It shouldn't be that colour," Tel said. "You see? It's almost red. Blood red."

He drew away from her, out into the garden to see it better. She followed him, for once not noticing the pull of the muscles in his back, the swagger in his walk. Tel was right; the comet did have a reddish hue.

"Something's wrong," he said quietly.

Pallas Athena shook her head slowly. "Something's begun, Tel. This is an omen. A warning."

"What Lachesis said…" he said slowly. "The fall of Christianity. It's begun already, hasn't it? Not just the Reformation. New ideas, new philosophies… this is the beginning of the end. Time to pick a side, she told us."

Athena took his hand in both of hers, kissed his palm. "I already have."


End file.
